Foxy Morons – Foxy Morons (Wrong Place (Right Time) Records)

Damn you, Everett True!

It’s only March and this is already the best EP of the year. I haven’t really listened to anything other than Foxy Morons for the past weeks and I probably won’t for months to come. There’s other music out there I’m missing and it’s all Everett True’s impeccable taste in music‘s fault.

Let’s take this slow, lest I lose myself. The first track, ‘Under the Sea’ is better than The Little Mermaid‘s ‘Under the Sea’. That should say enough, but there’s so much more to say. Foxy Morons know how to change the tempo: slow, then fast (but going from slow to fast slowly), back to slow again, and faster one last time. The chorus at the end cracks me up every time. “Oh no oh no H2O”! It’s admirably understated and yet so ridiculous. Foxy Morons underpromise and overdeliver.

I mean, come on. You’ve got all those bands writing half-finished songs, piling bad noise on top of worse noise. There are bands with pretty melodies but shitty lyrics and bands with poetry in their pen without conviction in their voice. Foxy Morons, on the other hand, have got their act together. Their songs are cleverer than the others (clever in the way your younger siblings are), they’ve got better melodies than the others (speaks for itself), they’re funnier (like a friend) and friendlier (like family) and finer (like the arts) than whatever else is out there. I’m ashamed to have Foxygen right next to them in my music library, because those dudes are so inferior, even at their best.

Example: the backing vocals! It’s like a small choir of angel’s singing in your bedroom, but the angels turn out to be your best friends who have dressed up (and taken singing lessons) and that’s so much more laid-back than having to deal with literal angels from heaven.

‘Ciggies’ reminds me of Courtney Barnett. She could totally write a line like “You know I only really smoke ciggies when I’m drunk / But I’m always drunk and I always wanna smoke, yeah”. It’s that clever turn-of-phrase, rhyming words that don’t ‘technically’ rhyme – but fuck that – perfection is boring – breaking-the-rules-rhyme is the best kind of rhyme. My favourite’s from the final track ‘Relative’: “They all say that pain is relative – and relative to what, I forgot – my feelings”. Yeah, try to get that to rhyme and then come back.

Oh, there are endless other tiny details and little trinkets I could pick up on. For a six-track EP, you get a lot of worth for your money. A high quality density. Low bullshit volume. Except the good kind of bullshit, the goofing around, hanging around, being around and being around the people you like. Coming back to Everett True, it was him who said that there’s nothing more to music criticism than “Why aren’t these people my friends?” I wish my friends were foxy morons.